Posted
by
Unknown Lamer
on Monday May 07, 2012 @06:41PM
from the solving-world-hunger-through-total-war dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The U.S. military is developing its next generation bomber with Chinese anti-access strategy — the ability to stop any enemy force from coming to fight with things like carrier killer missiles — in mind. The new bomber will replace older platforms like the 1950's B-52, the 1970's B-1, and 1990's B-2 stealth bomber. The new bomber will sport some unique qualities. It will have an option to be unmanned, will act similar to a UAV, have better stealth capabilities, will be connected to U.S. intelligence networks to create a 'smart' battlefield environment, and have near unlimited range thanks to in-air refueling."

I don't think I intended this to be funny. It was a few hours ago, so I admit my perspective may be skewed, but I think I was highlighting the fact that "unhackable" had the same veracity as "unsinkable" w.r.t. the Titanic. It's only a matter of time before someone figures out how to take control with a hack.

It would take the concerted effort of the majority of the world to "destroy" the USA militarily, leaving aside nukes or really good sneakiness. They have the strongest military in the world and very good logistics, and have adequate food, water, and oil supplies to sustain any war. Although industrial capacity has diminished in recent decades, a combination the military industrial complex and the U.S. auto industry means that it is still capable of the industry necessary for war. In terms of underwear bombs, the United States is so huge that while a proliferation of bombs would of course radically change life in the country, they would not destroy it.

Destruction is more likely to be wrought from poor incentive structures in U.S. government, which makes effective and necessary change very difficult.

True but, as communication technology has improved the rise and fall of empires has speeded up considerably. The Roman empire took several centuries to collapse, the British empire took a few decades. If that trend carries on one day you may wake up to the new Slashdotian empire in the morning, watch it grow over lunchtime and it will have collapsed and disappeared in time for tea.

I think that's the point: they're going through their resources (and morals) so quickly out of fear of those scary muslims that they'll eventually destroy themselves in non-military ways. Rather than being conquered, they'll be rendered irrelevant by their own actions.

The country is doing okay. The government... not so much. Many of the policies put in place over the last 50 years have been directly detrimental to the interests of the peoples of the United States.

When I, and many others, took the military entrance oath, it included the phrase,"defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic". Many of the actions taken by the government, and its myriad subordinate entities, would easily fall into that category. The problem is that even if you throw out the old rascals, the new ones probably won't be much better for very long.

The people that want to "use the methods of the system to clean it up" are stuck in a bad place. They want to fix the system, but the system has protected itself by making sure that the methods in place quit working. Instead the methods simply point out which ants need to have a finger put on them.

I love my country. It's people are my family. It's natural resources and history are my treasures. I understand now why my 97 year old grandmother was so ashamed of what our government had become. It hurts my family. It steals my treasures. It makes me a criminal in my own home.

It's setting up the conditions for the Second American Civil War. Too many people have little to nothing left to lose.And that number is growing despite the claims of a "recovery". The current policy makers seem to think that if they keep us distracted by constant foreign war, we'll not notice the corruption of our leaders, or the growing impoverishment of the people. That we're not informed enough, or smart enough to take a step back and see the big picture.

They know it would only take a spark in the right, or wrong, place to set the country ablaze. The internment camps have been built and in place for decades, and various agencies, policies, and procedures created to help control a popular uprising. It's understandable, of course. Any organism without a sense of self-preservation dies quickly, and a government is definitely an organisation. But it's poisoned itself for so long, it's starting to choke and wither. Soon, it won't even be able to defend itself against its own people, who've been disenfranchised and made into modern Huns. So many people are already enslaved in the American penal system, that numerically it's a country in its' own right.

Forget the scary "muslims", be afraid of the politicians, and the homeless, and the vanishing middle class who will soon be homeless.

Too many people have little to nothing left to lose.And that number is growing despite the claims of a "recovery".

That's not what I'd call "okay". Unless by "country" you mean the land mass or the geopolitical borders.

Regarding the rest of your commentary, unfortunately I have to disagree.,Tthe US still has high standards of living when compared to most of the southern hemisphere. People usually tolerate way, way, way shittier conditions without revolting, so you still have a long way to fall before any sort of spark sets the country ablaze. Also, the larger the country, the harder it is to mobilize a significant group. That is part of why europeans have better political representation, on the whole (not to say that they don't fuck up royally on a regular basis, but nevertheless it's still better than the US).

I could see something happening more like a fracturing across regional boundaries. The Left Coast, Northwest Ecotopia, the Mountains, the Great Middle, the New South, the Rust Belt and the Northeast. At this point there isn't much that the folks in Iowa and the folks in Boston agree on. And L.A. has been on a different planet for years now.

Interestingly, the less control that Washington tries to impose on the country (overriding states' prerogatives and cultural norms) the less pressure this is to split.

I think the answer is to create communities based on common cause. Social experiments with clear measures and means to communicate with one another. Clearly this mess is failing. Work together to build better, smarter, more sustainable human systems based in honoring the dignity of people and committed to empowering an ethical society where accountability and integrity are inherent aspects of being a citizen.

It would take the concerted effort of the majority of the world to "destroy" the USA militarily

The USSR wasn't destroyed militarily, it collapsed under the effort of paying for all the military dick waving.

However many big expensive toys it has, the USA can be taken down by a well funded terrorist organization. ALl they need to do is start blowing up a few airport scanner queues, etc., and the politicians will spend enough 'emergency' money for the USA to collapse under its own debt. Another country invasion (eg. Iran) would do the trick, no fancy new stealth missiles or long range bombers necessary.

The USSR wasn't destroyed militarily, it collapsed under the effort of paying for all the military dick waving.

Nope. As I have mentioned many times before, USSR "paid" for its military production to itself, because the whole production was government-owned and ran as a nonprofit. The only real "payments" were salaries -- consistent with the rest of the industry, and with full-employment policy those were unavoidable with or without military production. US propaganda projects the "expenses" sucked from the US government and society by military-industrial complex onto other countries, in an attempt to present them as

The USSR 'paid' for its military production by sacrificing investment in it's people, education and consumer goods in order to maintain expenditures in it's military. Where the resources are allocated matters. It also did so using a very inefficient (though theoretically nonprofit) model. The corrupt officials didn't need profits to move most of the remaining production into their pockets. When Perestroika kicked in and let people see what they were missing things started to fall apart and when they didn't quickly and oppressively use the military it came totally apart.

The US has also allocated resources to its military which don't improve people, education, consumer production or create consumer goods. These might be necessary expenditures but the fact is that the government spends on behalf of each family about $6k for defense. The wars have run another $10k. If part of that could have gone elsewhere without imperiling safety other benefits would have been received.

Sorry Belits but the USSR did collapse under the effort of paying for the military, just not in a dollars and cents kinda way. It collapsed because so much of its limited production capacity was diverted to the military there were huge lines for everything from shoes to toilet paper and one could bribe another with lipstick or fancy foods simply because they were so hard to come by they were quite valuable.

This is outlined and explained with the figures here [mongabay.com] but I'll quote one of the relevant bits "Soviet

It still constitutes an effort and resources that weren't spent on other things.

As I explained before, they were now. In US, government has a resource "ability to print money and give them to a bunch of rich guys without tanking the value of dollar". If it printed money (well, "loaned" them) and given them to military companies to pay for their profits, it can't print more to give them to medical insurance companies for their profits, and to textbook companies for their profits -- there would be so many dollars around, they would become unusable for international oil trade. So US can have either huge military or working healthcare and education.

In USSR everything was much simpler. Pay people salary that matches available amounts of consumer goods plus food, electricity and other living expenses for a given population. There is no "investment", so salaries will be spent on that, no point making them either higher or lower. Set mandatory standards for education, so people will be able to perform complex kinds of work, and would be bored out of their mind if they didn't have anything to do. Now, those people are your resource -- the only one that you have any chance to overuse unless you are dumb enough to run out of natural resources. Balance various kinds of industry and agriculture, and you have a stable society. That's what GOSPLAN was for -- with mathematicians working on optimization and stability.

So yes, it would be possible for military to drain resources out of the rest of the system -- it would happen if country ran out of people for everything else. Everyone would have to live in remote, isolated military industry towns, where all such production happened, and the rest of the country would be empty. Wind would blow tumbleweed across streets of Moscow and Leningrad. Do any of you realize how stupid that is?

There were thousands of ways to mess up USSR economy. They could miscalculate the amount of cash and mismatch it with products. They could over-emphasize infrastructure and have it unused because expansion of consumer goods production didn't keep up with it. They could over-emphasize consumer goods and overtax the infrastructure. They could underdevelop transportation and lose flexibility, thus having industry tied to established locations and require enormous effort to make any changes. They could piss off intelligentsia, lose the quality of education, and lag in industrial R&D. Many, many other things couls hurt USSR-style economy. But the idea that excessive military production did, or even could, produce enough harm to damage the economy is completely retarded. It's invention of Reagan-era US propaganda, and just like the rest of Reagan-era US propaganda, it makes no sense.

I'm finding your argument difficult to follow. My understanding of the situation was that too much of the production capacity was devoted to the production of arms and other heavy industry, so that it could not be used to produce consumer goods. People expected their standards of living to rise, but the system was inflexibly tied up with producing stuff nobody wanted, so the system collapsed. Is this wrong? Or are we talking about different things?

On the other hand, the hysteria over Muslim terrorists is preventing the US from investing its time and money in competing with China (and EU, and BRIC, and the rest of our global competitors). The underwear bomb isn't going to destroy America. But forcing every traveller through the underwear bomb detectors that don't work is surely destroying America. Along with all the other colossal wastes inspired by Muslim terrorists in our insane backlash.

A few hundred $billion invested in intel and assassinations, under a new legal regime that allows legitimate, Constitutional US courts to determine that certain specific people and militias are legitimate targets, would destroy the Muslim terrorist threat. Combined with a few hundred $billion more invested in education, trade and counter propaganda in the cesspools where these terrorists fester.

But instead, we're playing head-pong over "CHINA!" "TERRORISM!", responding badly to each. Because we insist on rage and paranoid overreactions, instead of careful strategy that uses force only as a last resort, not the first and only method.

The beauty of the US military/intel industry is that it can only get more money and power, regardless of its success or failure, so long as Americans have an enemy to fear (regardless of any reality). The US doesn't need to synthesize the Qaeda, but it does need the Qaeda to exist and keep attacking, even impotently and very occasionally. Why spend any of your military budget creating the Qaeda, when the Qaed

Wow, step away from the team red / team blue blinders. He didn't say anything about paranoid warmongering. He's talking about a Federal government freed from the bounds placed on it by its founding documents. This flag was planted firmly with the New Deal and the court-packing threats used to get approval from the Supreme Court for powers which clearly required constitutional amendments before laws could be enacted.

Fast forward to 2001 and you've got Bush pushing through the "Patriot Act", a law that wip

Uh huh...you DO know we spend upwards of 100 million on a triple A rated game and are damned lucky if the "AI" doesn't run into walls or parks its moronic ass right in the middle of a field with zero cover to get picked off while it stands there with a thumb up its ass, yes?

While I'm sure you are just trying to make a long winded skynet joke frankly we are so far away from AI that is as smart as a drunk rat it ain't even funny, much less being able to build something that was smart enough not to drool on it

The new "Long-Range Strike Bomber" [...] just $550 million per copy for up to 100 copies, with production beginning in the early 2020s. The U.S. Congress approved the first $300 million in development funding late last year. The Pentagon has vowed to cancel the Long-Range Strike Bomber if the total projected program cost exceeds $55 billion.

Maybe they should just strip down the F-22 fleet and make them unmanned.I bet they could do that for ~$100 million per plane.

Basically they are just a way to baboozle 55 billion dollars out of the US treasury with whispers in the dark of the yellow terror. With stealth cruise missiles that can be fired from land, ships, submarines and aircraft, why the hell would you stuff around with a 550 million dollar bomber whose only real purpose is to cost 550 million dollars.

You could imagine US corporations paying kickbacks to Chinese Officials to ramp up war talk and publicly advertise and exaggerate military capability. I wonder how big a bribe someone like Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Northrop Grumman would pay a few Chinese Officials to make threatening noises and to go on a militaristic marketing spree. A 10 million dollar investment out of one of those off shore tax haves, sure would, has, will go a long way to get some hostile words out of officials from China.

Besides it's in the Government of China's best interest to send the US broke by allowing the US military Industrial complex to spend trillions preparing to fight a fictitious war and with US lobbyists in the game, treasonous US politicians are right in it up to their necks.

With stealth cruise missiles that can be fired from land, ships, submarines and aircraft, why the hell would you stuff around with a 550 million dollar bomber whose only real purpose is to cost 550 million dollars.

Because cruise missiles typically have a range of 200-600 miles. Submarines and ships can only reach 600 miles from the coast; you need a launcher on land within 600 miles of your intended target. Or, you can launch from a mobile aerial platform, which can fly undetected within 600 miles of any

Because cruise missiles typically have a range of 200-600 miles. Submarines and ships can only reach 600 miles from the coast; you need a launcher on land within 600 miles of your intended target..

Where in the world did you get that from. As an ex submariner I can say FOR CERTAIN that submarines can get WAAY closer than 600 miles. Try maybe 6. If the water is over 50 feet deep, a sub can go there (and often does).

The other issue is that cruise missiles carry a limited amount of ordnance, so they're not going to be effective against heavily fortified targets. The Iranian nuclear facility at Fordow is buried under 200 feet of mountain and heavily reinforced with concrete. To destroy a hardened target like that, you need heavy-duty weapons like the 30,000 lb. Massive Ordnance Penetrator. And to drop an MOP, you need a bomber. Right now the B-2 is the only aircraft the U.S. has that is capable of both penetrating air defenses and carrying that kind of payload, and the B-2 fleet consists of a total of 20 aircraft.

For any actual open military conflict involving US and China (you know, the kind where you'd be launching cruise missiles or sending bombers 600 miles beyond the border of China!), I frankly don't see much point in anything other than ICBMs.

Actually, the pilots are very expensive. It costs millions of dollars to train a military pilot. By the time we retire the B-52, I'd hazard a guess that nearly every airframe has cost less than the military spent on the pilots that flew it over the years.

Who the hell lets this shit through? The new bomber is designed to counter new strategies. That doesn't mean it's "aimed at China". That's a needlessly belligerent phrase -- either warmongering or scaremongering over the prospects of war. If England develops bullets that can pierce American body armor, will we hear about new "British Guns Aimed at America!"?

What do you mean, "better in what way"? What are you, a commie terrorist nazi baby-killer illegal immigrant or something? It's better. That's all you need to know, and probably all you're cleared to know. It's all very top-secret, classified, but just trust us that it's better, and that it's totally worth the cost. SUPPORT THE TROOPS! U-S-A! U-S-A!

The truth is that this will really be aimed at China and North Korea because their locations make it really hard for the US to project any force in the region. The Middle East isn't a problem because we can base our weapons in friendly nations, and Russia isn't a problem because we have Poland and Turkey and those countries. The China/NK problem will only get worse as these countries develop anti-access weapons such as rockets and ballistic missiles. In China's case, the J-20 stealth fighter is probably going to be a strike fighter that is stealth only from the front; if you have a base nearby, China will flood your defenses with J-20s, then bomb it to pieces.

The new generation of bombers will be stealth enough to penetrate deep into enemy territory, big enough to carry munitions that can destroy bunkers (which cruise missiles can't do), and can be unmanned so they can be made cheaper and deployed more readily than the B-2.

Right now, the B-2 only has a two-man crew. Even if you refuel all the time, eventually the crew gets tired and has to sleep and the mission has to end. But with a drone, you can conceivably have the mission go on indefinitely if you can figure out how to refuel in flight. You can have extended loiter capabilities in enemy territory, which can be killer. The first wave of stealth goes in and bombs the known enemy air defenses. They carry bombs in reserve and loiter. The second wave comes in and when anyone opens their radar, the loiter drones pop them from behind. You can get pretty creative when you can fly a drone for days in a row.

If you modded the parent as "funny", I assume that you mean in an ironic sort of way. Because, the parent is right on target - so to speak. As a matter of fact, my Taiwanese friends are under the impression that if China decides to assert her ownership of Taiwan, the US would huff and puff and wouldn't do shit about it; hence why the Taiwanese diaspora here in the US.

If you ever wanted to know what it was like to live in Rome during its decline, come to the US- we know.

Yes, the phrasing of the article is flamebait.
The reality is for a top-end weapon system, you're going to design it to be used against the most difficult target as you project it will be over the lifetime of service. In this case, that means the toughest air defence systems, which would be Russia and China.

I'd never trust where the guns are going to point during a collapse. A good example now is Greece which is starting to fall apart, they voted in a neo-nazi party (according to everyone but themselves, they just call themselves nationalist and patriotic) with 7% of the votes that promises to expel all immigrants, put landmines on the border to Turkey to stop illegal crossings, they sell Mein Kampf at the party office and they do the Nazi salute (which they say is an ancient Roman and Greek salute). And while Greece has over 20% unemployment and a constant recession since 2008 they haven't even been thrown out of the euro or the EU yet so the situation could get a lot worse.

And behind Greece there's a whole lot of other dominos lined up that are also fighting a collapse, Spain and Italy being the prime concerns right now. I don't really think people see how bad the the worst case scenarios can get because these countries have been borrowing from each other just like the Lehman collapse, if one goes down the whole house of cards starts falling apart. And I'm sure the world economy doesn't need another kick in the balls from Europe, it seems down enough as it is. The whole of the 2000s after the dotcoms is starting to look like the world's biggest bubble, I don't mean any particular branch like housing but the whole world economy. That 2008 = 1929 and we're now early into the 1930s, I pray we don't get to the end of them...

It's not that we're worried about hardware backdoors. No one's gonna slip a backdoor into your resistor. The few parts complex enough to hold a backdoor get made in the US.

What we are worried about is that the resistors, line drivers, relays, etc. aren't actually spec'd for the environment they'll be used in. Consumer grade electronics, for example, are generally made to work from around 0 to 70 degrees C. Military grade is something like -55 to 125 degC. If you design a plane in which your circuit will need to operate at 100 degC, and you buy parts that can handle that stress, and some cheap Chinese manufacturer gives you consumer grade parts instead, then your circuit could fail at a very inopportune time.

Are you sure about that? All the parts I've worked on treat the top temperature as ambient, and die heating takes you ever higher above that. I suppose my company might just be doing it that way for the extra margin, but that seems like it would be an inconsistent approach, given variations in junction temp.

"That can only be achieved if there's ZERO electronic components made in China in the aircraft" -- the Department of Defense funds the Trusted Foundry Program [trustedfou...rogram.org] for just this purpose.

Why else would they build this thing to fight an enemy that doesn't even exist. Most likely it will be a trillion-dollar blackhole like the F-22 Fighter debacle. Do the politicians not care that the national + state debt is almost 19 trillion dollars? (almost $190,000 per household). Guess not.

Anybody who thinks China isn't 'the enemy' is smoking something good (come on, share it, dude). The next set of wars will be resource wars (just like the last ones). Likely by proxy and likely 'low intensity' but they will be wars nonetheless. The chance of the US and China going full out turn-the-the-guy-into-molten-glass is pretty low (but non zero).

There will be too much competition for oil (and possibly water) in the next 50 years. We're not doing anything to mitigate growth - our economy requires growth to survive - and so does China's.

That said, the idea that we need half billion dollar UAV bombers to pound somebody's jungle into a parking lot seems a tad over the top. TFA was really just an exercise in Pentagon babble, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing....

Uh huh.You probably think Iran is developing a nuclear weapon too. (Hint: They aren't.) As someone above said China would not attack us, because it would destroy their economy... they'd have no one to sell their products to.

Wrong. No one uses uranium to make weapons. No one. Uranium can only be used in gun-type designs which are 1) inherently unsafe and 2) extremely inefficient. When India and Pakistan developed nukes, they were full Teller-Ulam designs. If you think Iran would waste perfectly good uranium in a weapon, you're wrong. They wouldn't. They would use that uranium to breed Plutonium-239 and use *that* in a weapon. Uranium is very common, but not common enough to waste it in weapons when you can create vast amounts of Pu-239 with it.

Meanwhile, yes, the world's medical isotope supply is VERY DEPENDENT upon HEU targets. LEU is very inefficient, doesn't work for shit. So-called "anti proliferation" efforts have resulted in a near inability to generate medical isotopes to the point where if a reactor goes offline people die. And there are only FOUR REACTORS in the entire world producing medical isotopes. All are past their lifespan and running when a power-generating reactor wouldn't be allowed to. Every year they save more lives than nuclear weapons and accidents have ever killed.

I hope one of those four reactors doesn't go down when you or your family require cancer treatment or diagnostic imaging. Not like moly cows last too long.

"Well yes, we'd love to give you the best treatment for your rapidly growing cancer we can and find out where it is in your body with some nice Tc-99m, but well, a reactor went offline and due to political lobbying by anti-nuclear activists and the US state department, it will be at least 25 years until a replacement can be built. Although one probably never will be. But the chapel is down the hall and to the left..."

Not just oil and water but also food. China already has over a billion mouths to feed and spends a tremendous amount of effort trying to feed most of them. But the rural agriculture towns are increasingly looking at the modernizing cities with envy and looking at farm fields with scorn. Besides everybody knows Foxconn is hiring.

The population will soar, paired up with an increasing social divide. Farmers won't want to farm and food shortages will get worse. Water shortages will get worse. Nobody is

The Chinese-Americans, might I add and before we begin tromping out the POW camps, are more than happy to be out from under their homeland government, and will remain so up and until you or people like you, decide to start treating Americans as something lesser than citizens. Lastly, and for the record, no one gets to choose where they are born, but given enough freedom, they can choose where they live.

I like to revisit the US Debt Clock [usdebtclock.org] (warning flash heavy) from time to time. If you add in mortgage, personal, and student loan debt it's about ~180k per person. $190k per household is just government debt (total debt per household is closer to $700k, nearly $60 trillion altogether). As for money creation 'Currency and Credit derivatives' are approaching 1 quadrillion.

Yeah...there are arguments to be made that we don't need it,,,and it does have that nasty habit of suffocating it's pilots....but calling it a debacle is a bit strong. It does exactly what it was designed to do.

In wargames, it's always the raptors on blue and everyone else on red. And the raptors mop the floor up with the red team. Apparently some pilots of other planes feel that it is quite an accomplishment to even see/get a lock on a Raptor. Most of the time, you just get informed that you are dead and

Cheap solar powered very high altitude unmanned platforms that are cheaper to produce than the missile needed to shoot them down, just sitting up there until their payload is needed, be it a bomb, rocket, jammer, communications relay or recon.

Given the realities (ie corruption and incompetence) of the current Pentagon procurement system, if this project doesn't get killed it will be lucky to produce more than a handful of aircraft, at a cost of several billion dollars each.

The F-22 kickbacks have been paid off for a weapon that will likely never see service.

The F-35's on their way to suck at the budget teat in Canada and the US both. Planes which just happen to be ill-suited to patrolling the arctic, which is the main reason Canada wanted them in the first place, effectively making them as useless as the F-22s are for the US.

How many BILLIONS are they planning to spend on bombers to attack an "enemy" that shows no signs of military buildup or aggression THIS time?

Just how long is it going to take the world to stop feeding the military-industrial pigs that design this overpriced crap? When are our governments going to realize that you reach a point where no matter how much you've spent to date, you have to CANCEL a project because it will NEVER pay for itself nor deliver what it promised?

In an age of cruise missiles and smart missiles launched from conventional fighters and a demand from the public that all weapons be precisely targeted to minimize "collateral damage", what's the freaking PURPOSE of a bomber in the first place? If you want to nuke them, you'd use an ICBM. If you want precise targetting, you'd use a Tomahawk or a drone.

I cannot fathom that there are people actually walking around with squirrel-cage driven brains that came up with this depressingly evil idea. They envision another Cold War and MAD as if it's a good thing. People like this are traitors to the US and to the entire human race.

Take your Pax Americana, chickenhawk neocons, and shove it up your collective ass.

This plan is just a way to spend $TRILLIONS on US military/intel crony capitalists.

If the US just spent $1T on an industrial policy, and put China's neighbors in charge of their own military defense (but shared our intel), we'd have security, peace, and $TRILLIONS more. Not to mention the increased GDP and taxes from it, with a better functioning industrial system.

But that wouldn't dedicate all our money and effort to the war business. Which is the business that controls America.

ICBMs are NOT stealthy, have limited range, can not be refueled and are limited to 1 payload.Also, they were used for nukes, not conventional ordinance.

I like the idea of a UAV bomber. However, I think it should be a scaled up Predator that can be refueled and rearmed by flying into a specially equipped C-17 instead of this hybrid style of bomber they have proposed.

So I guess this means my grandkids are going to live in a world that is every bit as fucked up as this one.

Just out of curiosity: Have we any indication at all that China is looking to conquer the world and subjugate all of the West? Or is just a matter of making sure that the military contractors that already have the no-bid contract in their back pocket for this new "unmanned, unlimited range bomber aimed at China" can announce very nice projected earnings at their next shareholders meeting at Sanctuare? What kind of pieces of shit are our ruling class that they can look out over a country with eroding middle class incomes and say, "We really need to spend more on new weapons systems to fight the Chinese. Oh, and tax cuts for the rich! What the fuck is the matter with them?

Sometimes, I read a story like this, and the kid in my that used to love to play Army completely disappears, and is replaced by an adult that wishes the US would have an economic downturn sufficient to prevent its next wave of ridiculous military spending. I wonder if maybe getting a dose of what the rest of the world has been getting for the past forever might not be a good thing for America. Just enough of a taste to stop being so obsessed with having the biggest dick.

Honestly, I can't decide if our rulers are murderous sociopaths or just purely corrupted by corporate money. I don't believe it can be both. Murderous sociopaths tend to not be good for profits, and the purely corrupt tend to not have time for reveling in bloodshed because it gets in the way of their yachting and dressage time.

I don't look forward to the next election and the prospect of having to tell people I'm Canadian when I travel abroad, as I found myself doing during the past decade. The old Bowie song, "I'm Afraid of Americans" wasn't supposed to apply to Americans, I don't think.

What about if the Chinese get our codes and hack our defenses like the Cylons from BSG?

Then in an ironic twist, the political powers that be get a number of things they would dearly love - at the price of innocent lives. They have a "credible" threat to pursue - clearly hacking bombers is a clear act of war, they have a population that is deathly scared and willing to give up all manner of personal freedoms in exchange for perceived safety and they have an attack on their soverign soil which will motivate and infuriate the local population. They then get to enact just about every rule, law an